Just Mercy

January. Smack bang in the middle of awards season. All the big prestige films are lined up for release. All of them purposely created to win Oscars, Golden Globes, SAG's, Critic's Choice, Bafta's etc etc etc. Chock full of proper, intense thesping designed to get actors up to that podium, gripping them statues, pretending they never expected this to happen. Based on a true story, Just Mercy is one such film. But this time there's enough righteous anger behind it to make it worth while.

Monroeville, Alabama. 1987. A wood worker called Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx) is arrested for the murder of a woman and sent to death row. It's a creaky conviction, one based on lies and the testimony of a very unreliable witness. How was a trial even allowed to take place you ask? Well the victim was white and the "murderer" was black and Alabama is a hugely racist state. As lawyer Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) finds out when he opens a new practice to help poor people suffering in jail because they couldn't afford proper legal representation. What happens next made history.

Numerous times throughout Just Mercy, Harper Lee's seminal novel 'To Kill A Mockingbird' is mentioned and referenced. The people of Monroeville are proud of the fact the book was written in their little town and are quick to mention it to a black lawyer in an attempt to big up the town's civil rights history. His reaction says it all. The hypocrisy of the United States with regard to race issues distilled down to one withering look. It's a horrible moment but Michael B. Jordan's Bryan, stands tall, takes it on the chin with dignity and walks away. The kind of thing you'd imagine Atticus Finch doing and just like Gregory Peck's most famous role, Jordan plays his part with a quiet magnetism. Nothing showy, no grandstanding and you'll still pump your fist in the air at his wins and die a little inside at his losses. From doomed Wallace in The Wire, through his powerhouse turns in Creed and Creed 2 Jordan is after growing into a fantastic performer, natural as hell, someone you don't even notice acting. Just watch the scene where he visits Walter's family. Superb.

Unlike Jamie Foxx and Tim Blake Nelson. Both are fine but jesus they really go for it. Foxx, simmering quietly and Nelson going full panto as Ralph Myers, the witness who put McMillian in jail. Facial tics agogo, a lesser actor would have made this laughable but Nelson somehow pulls it back from the brink. Foxx does intense well but you never forget it's him you're looking at. Studied silences, explosions of anger, the way he moves, prison life having taken his spirit away. Everything prepared to a tee. Watching a master class in acting does tend to take you out of the film a little bit.

His anger though is a justifiable one, having seen his own father go through being jailed for a crime he didn't commit and that's what this film is really about. America's treatment of African Americans, the constant racial injustice they face, the prison-industrial complex built on their backs.  The dehumanising conditions prisoners live in. The way their lives end. Halfway through the film Bryan witnesses an execution and afterwards says it was the most horrifying thing he's ever seen. He's not wrong and we get to bear witness to it from start to finish. It's not graphic but it's traumatic. In a modern world and a civilised age there's no room for this brand of government issue brutality. 

Just Mercy is in cinemas now. It's a fine movie. An old story but a very necessary one. Keep watching as the credits roll too.